


Everyone's Asleep in This Burning Building

by easternepiphany



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 16:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1717241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easternepiphany/pseuds/easternepiphany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’ll be your landlady,” Gina adds with a tilt of her head. “Your sexy, younger landlady. Speaking of, there’s no sex discount, kiddo. First of the month, in full. I’m a real stickler about that sort of thing.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everyone's Asleep in This Burning Building

**Author's Note:**

  * For [usoverlooked](https://archiveofourown.org/users/usoverlooked/gifts).



> Happy Birthday to my beautiful, amazing, wonderful other half Libby. I love you enough to post this even though it's a little terrifying. God bless Gina Linetti for being the only human who could possibly make Jake Peralta the straight man.

“So, I’m kind of, like, your sugar mama,” Gina says with a self-satisfied smirk.

Jake groans and signs his name next to the little X. It hurts a little, in his hand and in his heart, but he crosses the T and pushes the stack of papers across the desk to the broker before he can change his mind.

 

Jake _should_ be better with money. He remembers his mom sitting up late at the kitchen table in their tiny apartment, going over the checkbook again and again until it was balanced to the last penny. He remembers fishing change out of pockets while Gina haggled with the guy at the candy store to give them a discount on the broken lollipops. He remembers the year Santiago drew his name for Secret Santa and bought him a book on personal finance.

But none of those indirect lessons ever seemed to stick, and all Jake has is an apartment with a monthly rent from 1976 and a bathtub full of mail he’d never open. So when Gina touts out the fact that somehow she’s been an _adult_ this entire time, saving up money for a _real estate venture_ , Jake is almost too flummoxed to argue. (That personal finance book might not have ever been cracked, but the dictionary app on his phone has certainly been getting a lot of use. Suck it, Santiago!)

“Look,” Gina says in what Jake recognizes as her serious voice, the voice she uses when she’s somehow not being completely ridiculous and weird and crazy, “this could just be temporary. I’ll save the apartment from being taken by some hipster with a sweet bank account, charge you the same rent you pay now, and then when you save up enough money, you buy it back from me and I’ll move on to bigger and better things.”

Nana’s apartment has two bedrooms on opposite sides, far enough away from each other to the point that their residents could possibly rarely interact. Separate bathrooms, too. So it would just be sharing a kitchen and living room with Gina, and he could do that. He’s _done_ that; had sleepovers with Gina here at Nana’s or at Gina’s house where her mom made English muffin pizzas and Gina teased him with stories about the ghost that lived in the hall closet.

“I’ll be your landlady,” she adds with a tilt of her head. “Your sexy, younger landlady. Speaking of, there’s no sex discount, kiddo. First of the month, in full. I’m a real stickler about that sort of thing.”

“You’re six months younger than me,” Jake protests, but it falls on deaf ears as they sign the paperwork and he cleans his comic books out of the spare bedroom— _Gina’s_ bedroom—and picks his dirty underwear up off the living room floor.

 

Jake doesn’t see any reason to tell everyone at work that he’s in so much financial trouble that he needs _Gina Linetti_ to swoop in and bail him out. Well, Captain Holt already knows, but that’s fine because honestly, Jake doesn’t have enough brain power to worry about all the times the Captain might have an unfavorable opinion of his personal life.

But then when Gina slinks around the precinct taking volunteers to help her move her things over to Jake’s, he sort of freaks out a little and drags her into an empty interrogation room.

“What are you doing?” he exclaims in a whisper.

Gina holds out her wrists like a perp waiting to be handcuffed. “Tricking people into moving my couch for me. You gonna arrest me, Detective Peralta?”

“Did you have to tell everyone we’re moving in together?”

“I wasn’t aware it was a secret.” She places a hand over her heart in mock-offense. “Are you ashamed of me? Don’t want all your little cop buddies to know your landlady-slash-roommate is a lowly administrator?”

Jake rolls his eyes. “Gina. My financial situation is embarrassing. Why can’t you just hire movers like a normal person?”

“First of all, kiddo, movers cost a lot of money. You really are a slow learner, aren’t you? Second of all, there’s no better way I can think of spending my Saturday afternoon than by watching Terry’s muscles haul my possessions up a few flights of stairs.”

As Jake opens his mouth to respond, the door opens and Amy barges in before stopping short when she sees Jake and Gina together. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Jake looks from Amy to Gina and back to Amy again. “No, it’s fine. Gina was just continuing to both save my life and ruin it at the same time.”

“I do what I can,” Gina drawls happily before prancing out of the room.

Amy stands there with a stack of folders in her arms and rocks back on her heels a bit. “So… you’re going to live with Gina.”

“You can keep saying it, but that’s not going to make it any more real for me. Turns out you were right about that whole “pay your bills and be a responsible adult” thing.”

“I’m right about most things,” Amy says with a small smile. “I got roped into being on the moving committee, so I expect to be compensated with lunch from the good deli, not that crappy place that’s racked up like twelve drug busts in the last year.”

Jake salutes. “Aye, aye, Santiago.”

She rolls her eyes fondly and turns on her heel, but spins back around before she makes it out the door. “Have you and Gina ever—? You know what? Never mind, it’s none of my business. Forget I asked.”

Jake makes a face instead of answering and it’s not until Amy chuckles and leaves does he scuff the ground with the toe of his shoe and exhale sharply.

 

For some unknown reason, Gina owns two blenders _and_ a margarita machine, so after Terry, Amy, two of Amy’s brothers, Rosa, and Charles all leave (for some _other_ unknown reason, Gina owns more underwear than a Victoria’s Secret and her boxes full of them were surprisingly the most complicated things to move), Jake mixes too many batches of strawberry margaritas. They’re the thick, slushy kind that taste more like an Icee from the movie theater than a cocktail, but Gina slips an extra shot of tequila into each batch when she thinks Jake isn’t looking.

The first time Jake got drunk was here at Nana’s; he and Gina had stolen a bottle of peppermint Schnapps from Gina’s mom’s liquor cabinet, and when Nana went to bed that night, they huddled on the fire escape and took turns taking gulps from the bottle. It was disgusting—tasted more like Listerine than anything else—but they drank it anyway, until falling off the fire escape became a very real possibility. Jake remembers how red Gina’s cheeks got, like she had a fever, and the way her snores were deep and loud when she slept sprawled out on his bed, taking up too much of it and slipping out the door the next morning when Nana found the two of them reeking of alcohol and sleeping in their clothes from the day before.

Now they’re on the couch, too cold for the fire escape, and Nana isn’t going to yell at them in the morning. There’s a pile of boxes in the living room full of Nana’s things that need to be moved to the attic. Jake estimates they’re about three margaritas in when Gina starts pawing through one of the boxes.

All of the sudden, she lets out a low groan that turns into a laugh. “Oh _yeesh_.”

“What?” Jake asks, leaning forward to look over Gina’s shoulder.

She holds it up: an eight-by-ten of the two of them at senior prom, Jake’s hands gently resting on Gina’s waist, her braces sparkling in the flash of the camera. She wore a slinky blue dress made of some sort of shimmery material and his bow tie and cumberbundt matched. It was hard to tell from her updo, but Jake was ninety-nine percent sure her hair was crimped.

“Jakey, aren’t you going to go to prom?” Nana had needled. “It’s your senior year, your last chance. Take Gina. Buy her a nice corsage and show her a good time. Give an old lady something to look forward to.”

So he did: he asked her with a shrug so she’d know it wasn’t a big deal, and he stood and smiled as their mothers each snapped the camera about fifty thousand times. They cooed over how precious their children were, but if they’d known about the flask tucked inside Gina’s strapless bra, they might have thought differently.

“Nice metal mouth,” Jake says.

Gina smacks him on the arm. “Shut up, Peralta. You didn’t think so when you were begging me to slow dance to that song from _City of Angels_.”

“Begging you! I think it was the other way around.” He struggles for a minute and remembers through the tequila haze—swaying side to side, Gina’s hands politely on his shoulders, Johnny Rzeznik’s scratchy belting. He doesn’t remember how it started, but everyone around them was dancing and they were technically dates so they did, too. Maybe it was a mutual decision. Maybe Jake asked with an overdramatic flourish, to be funny and ease the discomfort.

“That dress was so bangning,” Gina sighs dreamily. “I got it at Deb.”

“Remember how excited Nana was? She had this in a frame on top of the TV for like _years_.”

Gina laughs again and puts the picture back in the box. “Hey Jake?”

“Yeah?”

She brings her knees up to her chest and rests her head on her knees. “Thank you for letting me live in her house.”

Jake closes his eyes and sees Gina in braces, all elbows and knees, and smiles. “Thank you for saving it.”

 

If Jake’s life was a movie, he’d want it to be something cool and full of explosions. Something where he’d get to shoot guns (even though he does get to do that in real life) and walk away from explosions. Something like _Robocop_ or _Die Hard_ or even _Rush Hour_.

But there’s a voice in Jake’s head—sometimes it sounds like Amy, sometimes it sounds like Rosa, but a lot of the time it’s Gina’s—that reminds him that his life isn’t like that at all. It’s more like a romcom, or maybe just a com with elements of the rom. It’s the kind of movie where he comes home from an overtime shift to find Gina and Rosa on the couch painting their toenails. (“What?” Rosa barks when he stares. “Pedicures are important.”) It’s the kind of movie where Gina and Amy do yoga in the park across the street. (And maybe Jake has to run upstairs and take a cooler-than-normal shower but it’s not really his fault because _yoga pants_.) It’s the kind of movie where he and Gina walk to work in the morning and Captain Holt passes on messages to Gina through Jake on her days off and Gina eats lunches out of his tupperware containers.

It’s also the kind of movie where, a few weeks later, Jake sits in a massage chair and lets Gina and Rosa put some sort of honey-lemon mask on his face. The kind where Amy critiques his downward dog. The kind where he makes gumbo on Sundays and ladles it into two tupperware bowls for his and Gina’s lunch the next day.

And Jake would probably give it a 93 on RottenTomatoes.

 

No one knows this, but Gina is the first girl Jake ever kissed.

In eighth grade, a few weeks after a bar mitzvah where girls weren’t suddenly impressed with his Jewish manliness, he went to a party, a real-life boy-girl party in Corey Henderson’s basement. Corey’s parents were all the way upstairs on the second floor, and it wasn’t long before someone brought out an empty RC Cola bottle and instructed everyone to sit in a circle.

When it was Jake’s turn, he had hoped the bottle would land on Melissa Ramirez, who inexplicably came back from spring break with boobs and a shiny, braces-free smile. He took a deep breath and flicked his wrist in what he hoped was a lucky way. It almost was. It landed about two inches to the right of Melissa’s beautiful right knee. On Gina.

Gina was a bit of a loudmouth and didn’t get along with a lot of the kids in eighth grade. Jake’s mom was constantly lecturing him about watching out for her, but he wasn’t sure how to explain to his mother that no one needed watching out for less than Gina. But he still made sure to bring her along to parties and baseball games. Now, it was backfiring to the worst extent.

With a loud groan and a roll of her eyes, Gina was pushed to her knees by Melissa on her left and Nathan Boone on her right. Jake panicked a bit but knew there was no way to impress Melissa by whimping out on kissing another girl. And maybe Melissa would see him kiss Gina and suddenly have a fit of uncontrollable jealousy and throw Jake into the weird closet where Corey’s parents kept their hippie clothes.

Gina’s lips were soft and tasted like kiwi lip balm. Jake wondered if he was a good kisser. Since Gina didn’t throw up, he assumed that was a good sign, but there was a little something in her face as she pulled away, something Jake wasn’t sure if he should attribute to the lighting or all the soda she’d drank. It was almost a smile.

  
One night after a particularly trying case is finally closed, the Nine-Nine goes out for drinks. Charles is _a little_ smashed, sad because Vivian has very unceremoniously called off the wedding and moved to Canada and Rosa brought some tall beefy dude. (And, okay, the dude is not only really tall but also really handsome. Like, supermodel handsome. In fact, Jake’s not convinced he actually isn’t a supermodel.) Jake keeps him company in a booth in the corner, half to be a good friend but half to make sure Charles doesn’t do anything Full Boyle.

“You live with Gina,” Charles slurs after Rosa and supermodel man duck outside. Her hand is actually in the back pocket of his jeans. It’s… interesting.

“That I do, Charles,” Jake says. “That I do.”

“That’s weird. Is it weird? It’s gotta be weird.”

Jake pauses to take a swig of beer. Gina is trying to teach Terry and Amy some sort of complicated-looking dance move, and Amy is flailing around miserably; Gina has to stop every few seconds to laugh at her. The thing is, he wants to tell Charles, is that it’s so _not_ weird that it actually is weird. It’s routine to wake up and make enough coffee for both of them. It’s routine to argue about what to watch on TV. It’s routine to watch her sleepily brush her teeth every night while he flosses over her head.

“You know that I want you to marry a nice Jewish girl,” Nana said to him once, “but I wouldn’t mind if you married Gina instead. She’s good people, Jakey.” At the time, Jake just shrugged because Gina was _Gina_ , she was the little sister he never had or wanted. She was the girl who dramatically acted out the scene from _My Girl_ when she got her first period and yelled at him not to talk to her for five to seven days. He had to go to all her stupid dance recitals and invite her to all his birthday parties and force her to swear on a stack of Mariah Carey albums that she wouldn’t tell anyone his favorite show was actually _Golden Girls_.

Just as he’s about to answer Charles with a half-hearted response, Gina stumbles up to their table and plops down next to Jake. “Tragic,” she says dramatically. “Amy Santiago has got to be the worst dancer on the face of the earth.”

“Gina, what do you think about Rosa’s boyfriend?” Charles asks.

Gina raises her eyebrows. “Are you kidding? That is one fine specimen of man meat. He should do an NYFD calendar. I don’t care if he isn’t even a firefighter.”

Charles moans a little and slumps his head on the table.

“There, there, little fishy,” Gina says as she pats him on the head.

“Fishy?” Jake asks.

Gina shrugs and helps herself to a gulp of Jake’s beer. She drains a good chunk of it and he shoves her shoulder gently but hard enough that she spills down her shirt. “You know all the girls used to call you Jerk Peralta, right? This is why.”

Her shirt is a little see-through now, just enough to see the lace of her bra in the wake of the beer stain, and Jake stares confusedly for a second before shaking his head. He’s seen Gina’s bras: strung over the towel rack in the bathroom as they dry, in the basket of dirty clothes she lugs to the laundromat, on her bedroom floor as he pops in to ask her something. But he’s never seen them _on_ her person. Gina is a woman. Gina has breasts.

“Boyle, forget about Rosa,” Gina slurs. “You need a new woman, one like Vivian but without the strange ambition to move to Canada. Trust me, I have vast romantic experience.”

“Gina, that was almost helpful,” Charles says into the table. “Thank you.”

“Yeah Gina, how much have you had to drink?” Jake asks, very determinedly looking at Gina’s eyes instead of her chest. Jake’s been on the receiving end of a lot of “eyes up here” jokes, but for some reason he thinks Gina being on the other end would be the worst of them.

Gina waves a hand dismissively. “What’s nine plus five?”

Jake takes that as a hint to call it a night. He puts Charles in a cab and wraps an arm around Gina’s waist to steady her. He’s not drunk but he feels it somehow, navigating through the lobby of their apartment building, pushing the button on the elevator. Maybe he drank more than he thought.

“You aren’t going to carry me up the stairs, Detective Peralta?” Gina asks in an awful southern accent.

“You wish, Linetti.”

“My shirt is still wet,” she whines and Jake is very proud of how he _does not_ take another sneak peak at the lacey edges of her bra.

Jake props Gina up against the wall as he unlocks the door and practically shoves her inside. This is a weird night, a night filled with strange and frightening feelings, and all Jake wants to do is go to bed and sleep until the last possible second before he’ll be late to work. In 36 hours.

“Okay bedtime,” he proclaims loudly, not-so-gently pushing Gina in the direction of her bedroom. She’s two steps from her doorway when she stops and moans loudly.

“What the hell?” Jake almost yells.

“I washed my sheets but never put the clean ones on.”

Jake peeks around the corner and sees the bare mattress with a pile of sheets on top, balled up almost pathetically.

“Please let me sleep in your bed?” Gina begs. It’s a little pathetic as is but then she drops down to her knees in front of Jake and god help him but he’s a heterosexual male and sometimes his dick does things his brain doesn’t want it to do.

“Gina,” he starts with a sigh, taking a fairly large step backwards.

“Jake, I’m sleepy and drunk and I have to work tomorrow. Please don’t do this to me.”

He throws his head back and stares at the ceiling for an agonizing minute. “Fine. But you hog the blankets and I reserve full rights to murder you and have Rosa help me cover it up. And she will, too.”

Gina claps and jumps up and her grin quickly turns into a frown.

“No puking!” Jake cries.

 

Here’s the thing about Gina Linetti that Jake realizes at three in the morning as he listens to her snore and wills himself not to get hard everytime she shifts against him:

Ever since they were little, he’s always thought he was better than her.

And it’s not true, not even a little, because beneath her Dina Lohan face scrub and that annoying voice she does when she’s right, Gina is a good person. She’s the person who’s stuck by Jake through everything. She’s the person who held his hand at Nana’s funeral and helped him pick out pants for his police academy interview. She’s the person who taught him how to smoke a joint when the guys in ninth grade teased him for coughing. She’s the person who bailed him out when he was going to have to live in the break room at the precinct, avoiding Amy’s complaints about how his dirty socks smelled like pizza.

So what, she’s not a police officer? He’s been one for years and the secret is that it’s really not as hard as TV makes it look. Okay, her job isn’t particularly challenging and sure, she doesn’t have bullets flying at her sometimes when things get hairy. Does that make you more a more worthwhile person?

Gina’s the one who grew up and got her shit together. She has a savings account and she actually puts money into her 401k every month instead of seeing how long the bank will keep it open while empty. Not to mention the most important thing about her: she might be the only one in the nine-nine who Captain Holt unconditionally likes.

Those are all important qualities in a person. And those are all reasons that Jake’s been wrong about Gina since the day they met, since her mom dropped her off at Nana’s on a Saturday morning so she could pick up an extra shift at the bank. That morning, he remembers, he knew her only as the annoying girl who sat in the front row of first grade, who colored the grass red and the sky purple on purpose and then told everyone else they must have never been outside.

Gina—and Jake makes a very strong mental note not to tell Charles this—is probably his best friend.

She shifts again in her sleep just then, her ass settling right over his dick. He takes a deep breath and counts to seven hundred and forty-nine before he falls asleep, too.

 

Somehow Gina stumbles out of bed around eight and (Jake assumes) makes it to work on time. Jake stays in bed until noon, watches TV in boxers and a t-shirt while eating cereal, and is sprawled in a massage chair when Gina comes home.

“Yikes,” she says as she stands over him. “You look awful.”

“Thanks, so sweet of you to say.”

Gina plops on the couch and crosses her legs. “What’s up, little pup?”

Jake turns up the massage level to high so that the chair beats itself into his back. It feels bad and good at the same time, that strange mix of _I need to keep doing this_ and _I need to stop this right away_. It’s a metaphor.

(Jake paid attention in high school, thank you very much, Amy Santiago.)

“I’m sorry.”

Gina looks around the room. “For what? Did you use my toothbrush to clean the toilet? Or, wait. Did you call a phone sex line and pretend to be me? Cause I did that to you a few years ago and charged it to your credit card. The fact that you never noticed should have told me something about your financial situation.”

“What?” Jake shakes his head. “No, no. I’m sorry because this entire time I’ve been underestimating you as a person and I shouldn’t have. You are a surprisingly competent adult and human being, and you always have been. I guess I was too busy _not_ being one to notice.”

Gina stares at him for a minute with a strange look on her face, one Jake knows he’s seen before but doesn’t know where. After an unbearably long silence she finally responds.

“Okay, so now are you going to apologize for your all-night erection? Because you know if it lasts more than four hours, you should probably call a doctor.”

Jake stutters and sputters a bit and Gina laughs before standing up and plopping herself on his lap.

“Oooh, high-volume massage.” She pokes his nose with the tip of her index finger. “It’s okay, kiddo. I know it’s difficult to live with such a sexy person as myself.”

“I think I take back everything I said about you being an actual human,” Jake says half-heartedly.

“You still don’t get out of the rent with sexual favors. How many erections have I caused you over the years, anyway? I mean, I can do some calculations, but...”

“Please stop talking,” Jake moans.

“...multiply by at least ten for the years of puberty and you get—”

Jake takes her chin in his hand and brings her mouth to his. It’s the only way he knows to get her to shut up.

 

“So can you eat this stuff when you’re done?” Jake asks.

Amy _tsk_ s loudly. “Of course you can’t _eat it_. That’s disgusting.”

“But it’s basically guacamole!”

Rosa kicks him in the shin. “It’s not guacamole, you idiot. It’s a cleansing and refining face mask.”

Jake thinks that only Rosa could still look menacing with mushed avocado spread across her face. Even though a little bit is in her hair.

“If we’re licking avocado off each other then it becomes a sex thing and we have to kick Amy and Rosa out,” Gina says as she spoons a little more onto Jake’s forehead. He wiggles his eyebrows lewdly and she laughs.

Rosa and Amy gag and Amy actually stands up and does a lap around the coffee table before sitting back down and holding a pillow over her face.

“You guys are prudes,” Gina accuses.

“I’m not a prude,” Rosa says. “But there are dicks I want to think about and dicks I don’t and Peralta’s falls very squarely into the _don’t_ category.”

“Same,” Amy says meekly.

Jake shrugs and licks some stray avocado off his upper lip. “Gina, tell them they’re missing out.”

“It’s the Milan of penises,” Gina says, sweeping her hands out across an invisible marquee.

Rosa and Amy groan and gag again and somehow there’s avocado all over the living room by the end of the night, but Jake doesn’t really mind all that much.

 


End file.
